Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
April 18th, 2009 at 8:06AM
[…] A professor of English describes university life.Aim: To change things. UD at Inside Higher Ed About Margaret Soltan Other Writings Subscribe to UD’s Feeds ← Previous Post: The Way We Were […]
April 18th, 2009 at 10:35AM
Thanks for this link. I’ll need to read this book when it comes out. The excerpt is disturbing on many levels. I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the early days of High Theory, and while I managed to evade many of the traps Kirn describes, I found them in abundance when I went on the market in the early 90’s. The politics became very complex–recursive, even–and I thought back to the advice the Grad School Prof In Charge Of Placement had given his charges as we trooped to our first MLA interviews: "if you go into the room and there’s a picture of Foucault on a dartboard, it could be an invitation, or it could be a trap."
Hard to know which way to turn in such circumstances.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:26AM
> "I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself."
Since UD has a wide range of readers, I’m curious: Did any of the science folks think this way when they were in school?
April 18th, 2009 at 1:02PM
The answer is no – at least for me.
One of the things that drew me to science was not having to suck up to assholes in the English (with all due respect) or other (non-science) departments.
f = ma
If you get the right answer and can prove it, there is no argument. Science is a lot less subjective than other non-scientific disciplines.
I’ll give an example. I once took a mob English course where a great man lectured and all the exams were graded by TA’s. We were on the quarter system. I got an A, a B, and a C in this course. There were two graders. I always got an A on my exams from the first grader and a C from the other.
Another example. I took a freshman philosophy class and wrote a paper claiming that Plato was an idiot -> grade C. As a senior I took a political theory class and submitted a very similar paper, at least as far as the ideas were concerned –> Grade A.
Q.E.D.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:29PM
When universities bemoan the fact that too many students choose to major in disciplines such as Economics, Political Science, and History (see, for example, http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/07/0402/1b.shtml) they need only to read narratives like these and understand that many undergraduates want no part of such a humanities scene. It’s not that the students are dense, but rather many are very capable of seeing through the antics, posturing, and sycophancy.